The increased diversity of display devices available to consumers poses a number of challenges to content authors. For example, in some scenarios, authors may compose documents that are optimized for display on a mobile phone in portrait mode that may not be suitable for presentation when the device is used in landscape mode. The readability and appearance of such a document may be compromised further when displayed using a desktop monitor, a virtual reality display device, a wearable display device, an 80-inch screen, a video or a printed page.
At another level, the growing diversity in available display devices is in contrast with the static formatting instructions that are typically used to generate documents. For example, authors are generally limited to providing specific formatting instructions such as “set these two words to 18-point, bold font,” “place this text ¾ of an inch from the top of the page,” or “place these 2 images side-by-side with a 48-point gutter between the two of them.” Such static formatting instructions may only be suitable for a few display formats, and such instructions do not typically anticipate or accommodate other display formats. When displaying such content in a format that was not anticipated, the content may be presented in a way that is completely different from what the author originally had in mind or was intended. In addition, the display of such content on small screens may reduce the size of images or text to a point where it may not be readable.
In addition, by only relying on specific formatting instructions, some of the author's intent may not be fully expressed. For instance, a manually-generated layout may be limited by the author's knowledge of formatting instructions. There may be a large number of formatting options that are available to present the content, but may not be used because they are unknown to the author or because the author does not have sufficient time to add this explicit formatting. As a result, the content may not be presented in a way that is consistent with the author's intentions.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.